Quill & Quire Article – Book Making: Inhabit Media’s Louise Flaherty on republishing an Inuit classic

Quill & Quire interviewsLouise Flaherty about republishing Uvinik Qaminiq’s book, Amaruq: The Wolf.

“Louise Flaherty first encountered Amaruq: The Wolf as a teacher trainee in the Eastern Arctic Teacher Education program. 

Run by the Baffin Divisional Board of Education, the program was established in 1979 to train teachers who were bilingual in English and Inuktitut to meet the needs of the students in the Eastern Arctic, now called Nunavut.

Among the courses on offer was a writing workshop. In one such workshop held in the summer of 1997, Uvinik Qamaniq, one of the participants, wrote Amaruq: The Wolf over three weeks. One of the first novels written in Inkutitut, the work features a story within a story: Pittaaluk, a modern-day Inuit teenager, asks his grandfather to tell him, over the course of several days, the story of Amaruq, an ordinary boy who discovers he has the powers of a shaman through his spirit helper, the wolf of the book’s title. After first growing aware of his special skills on an important seal hunt as a teenager, Amaruq heads off on a quest to learn more about his powers and how to control them with the encouragement of an elder in his camp.”

You can read the full article HERE.